Don’t Say A Word (A Quiet Place, 2018)
Warning: This review contains potential spoilers!
Films with strong, central, short-story-like premises are doing bonkers at the box office lately. Netflix’s dystopian Black Mirror is a massive target for both memery and praise alike. 2016’s Don’t Breath seemed to shake the cobwebs out of the thriller genre and Get Out followed to smash expectations and sweep awards ceremonies across the world. In the wake of these offerings, a new sci fi horror/thriller flick with a simple, one-sentence premise (one eerily similar to Don’t Breath if you stop and think about it) has arrived… to wavering applause.
To sum up A Quiet Place in the promised single sentence: violent monsters that hunt via acute hearing have killed millions (maybe billions), forcing survivors to live silent lives in your otherwise typical post-apocalyptic style. Enter John Krasinski (playing Lee Abbott), director and leading man, who has taken up residence in a farm complex with his wife (and real-life partner), Evelyn (Emily Blunt) and two children (a third taken by the monsters early in the film and a fourth on the way).
The film’s central conceit promises any imaginative filmmaker a virtual sandbox with which to play, though the sandbox does fall apart rather quickly if any real logic is applied to its construction. The challenge to the filmmaker is thus to cover up gaping holes with clever editing and character building, something Krasinski and his actors manage to pull off … for a bit, at least. At least until the cracks start to appear in the frame of the sandbox.
The blind and incredibly violent monsters, effectively hidden from plain view until the second half of the movie and resembling something like an armoured bacteria crossed with a spiny gorilla (picture that), have seemingly devastated life on Earth. Lee’s feverish flicking between radio channels suggests that every country from Canada to Japan has suffered the same fate, begging the question of just how far spread the problem is and why the hell any effective military couldn’t defend noisy population centres, which the creatures (according to the movie’s own rules) would have trouble even entering without pain or disorientation.
Newspaper clippings taped to the walls of the farmhouse bunker present offensively obvious clues that the global community did have some time to react. Hell, they even had time to print out and distribute newspapers (a very noisy task, I’ve heard). So where did it all start and how did these creatures manage to force humanity back to the era of agricultural revolution? How is Krasinski’s family living peacefully on a farm, apparently with functioning electricity and running water, without attracting the creatures to a rumbling generator or pump? And why the hell would you want to bring a baby into a world in which it can’t scream and cry and do all the ear-rakingly loud things babies generally like to do? The brave mum and dad do everything in their power to protect their children, and prepare for those to come, but the pregnancy smacks of “THIS IS A PLOT POINT, PAY ATTENTION”.
The characters of A Quiet Place make the same series of dumb decisions that every thriller-fanatic expects and shouts at the screen against, simply to move the plot along. Character development, apart from the grieving for a son lost, is absolutely minimal. Instead, characters exist so that the plot, with all its creative ideas for tense set-pieces, can exist. Even the film’s central emotional plot of forgiveness and acceptance between family members falls flat because the answer is so bleeding obvious that no one even need speak it. One “final stand” sacrifice in the last scenes of the film — an admission of love that didn’t need admitting — would hardly have been an issue if someone had just kept their bloody mouth shut and let the creatures sniff on by, for example. But no, they have to shout and swing an axe at the impenetrably armoured beast, because that’s what heroes are expected to do.
Never-the-less, despite the complaints of all of us who obviously know better than the characters in the scene, A Quiet Place is a fun little romp through an intriguing premise, wrapped up in a neat 90 minute package. There are a few small elements that absolutely make the film, such as an upright nail that becomes the greatest point of tension for the whole runtime… but other than that, the scares are all pretty by-the-book. If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ll know what to expect. A Quiet Place is a valiant effort, but you don’t have unlimited options when working with a strict single-sentence premise like this? There’s only so many ways you can run from blind, incredibly sound-sensitive monsters.
One specific scene sticks in my mind as particularly “jammed in” for the sake of it: a bereaved and bedraggled survivor is encountered and screams out in an apparent suicide attempt. This little vignette is so out of place and handled so oddly (it is never brought up again, never really alluded to before), that the audience is left more startled, confused and upset than anything else.
The world of A Quiet Place is visually pleasing and evocative, something like The Walking Dead with aliens (wait, does The Walking Dead have aliens yet? I’ve completely lost track of that, but it wouldn’t surprise me). Despite all the horror creeping through the woods, the scenery around the farmland is absolutely gorgeous, some of the shots more like promo imagery for luxury wine tours rather than the infested prowling ground of sightless monsters. The farm, with its fence of warning fairy-lights (however illogical) makes for a great set.
The creative ways in which the characters avoid making noise are also highlights of this film, but also serve to raise more questions. How can they walk around, even with all the soft sand they’ve poured down on their regular routes, if they can’t even safely play Monopoly with the classic metal play-pieces? The levels to which sound can be made, like the personal characteristics and desires of our leading family, seem to morph and change depending on the required tension of the scene.
Overall, A Quiet Place is a neat little distraction that rewards the imaginative. You’ll probably continue to enjoy the film long after leaving it if you can put aside all the holes in logic, instead devising your own survival strategies and critiquing those of the plot-driven leads (like I’m doing now. Look at me, I’m having heaps of fun tearing it apart! You can too!)
ZOOM IN
➕ Gorgeous scenery and some sweet set-pieces
➕ You’ll get some genuinely good jump scares out of this film, as well as suffer a healthy bit of tension
➖ The logic of the film world, despite all attempts to suspend disbelief, will bug and nag anyone with too critical an eye
➖ The film hardly respects its audience, instead offering blatant “plot laws” written onto a prominent white board, as if you couldn’t figure them out yourself
➖ The motivation of our characters is weak, plot driven instead of driving the plot
